Typesafe Activator is a custom version of sbt which adds two extra
commands, activator ui and activator new. The activator
command is a superset of sbt, in short.
You can obtain Activator from typesafe.com.
If you see a command line such as sbt ~test in the
documentation, you will also be able to type activator ~test.
Any Activator project can be opened in sbt and vice versa because
Activator is “sbt powered.”
The Activator download includes an activator script and an
activator-launch.jar, which are equivalent to the sbt script and
launch jar described under
manual installation. Here are the
differences between Activator and a
manual installation of sbt:
activator with no arguments will attempt to guess
whether to enter activator shell or activator ui mode;
type activator shell to force the command line prompt.
activator new allows you to create projects from a large
catalog of template projects,
for example the play-scala template is a skeleton
Play Framework Scala app.
activator ui launches a quick start UI that can be used to
work through tutorials from the template catalog (many
templates in the catalog have accompanying tutorials).
Activator offers two downloads; the small “minimal” download contains only the wrapper script and launch jar, while the large “full” download contains a preloaded Ivy cache with jars for Scala, Akka, and the Play Framework.
